Click on Michael West 'Penny Wong 'deeply concerned' again. PVO rails against 'the elites'. Who are these mysterious elites? Plus hate speech fury erupts as terrorists wreck the Australian icon The Big Banana. Pauline goes ape over Ben Roberts-Smith and much more' #auspol
Click on Owen Jones 'The United States has suffered its biggest strategic defeat since it emerged as a superpower. This is a worse defeat than Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. It comes after Donald Trump threatened genocide against Iran, which must never and will never be forgotten. It underlines that his continued presence in the White House is a threat to humanity and he must be removed. But that threat itself is part of a broader story which is the disintegration of American hegemony which has three pillars economic, military and moral.
Now you can tell
the Trump administration is rattled. The White House director of communications
has sent me a let's say sketchy message.
Seriously, it's
absolutely wild. We will come on to it. The dangers are not over but US power
has suffered a crushing blow. It's a defeat for Israel, too, whose elite are
currently overwhelmed with fury and humiliation. We'll certainly talk about
that. A quick reminder, this illegal and unprovoked war on Iran was launched in
order to overthrow the regime and crush its military capabilities. has done
none of those things.
And instead has
handed Iran de facto control over the straight of hummus, one of the main
arteries of the global economy where a fifth of oil passes as well as other
essential resources like liquefied natural gas, liqufied petroleum gas,
petrochemicals, metals and industrial materials. Huge damage, huge economic
damage has been inflicted on the West, including the United States that has yet
to be properly felt, but it will be. The West Gulf allies and Israel have also
suffered huge economic damage and the reputations the Gulf States built as
stable oasis of autocratic calm have been totally shattered and that is their business
model.
The US has depleted a significant amount of its military arsenal which was already depleted. Hence the opposition of the US chair of the joint chiefs of staffs the head of the US army to the war being launched in the first place. So let's just go through this shall we? Last night as the deadline set by Donald Trump before he destroyed Iranian civilization that is committed genocide against Iran as that deadline expired the president posted on Truth Social declaring that based on the request of the Pakistani government to hold off from acting on his threat he agreed to suspend bombing for two weeks subject to Iran agreeing to the complete immediate and safe opening of the Strait of Hormuz . He declared a double-sided ceasefire claiming to have exceeded military objectives. He also said, "We received a 10-point proposal from Iran and believe it is a workable…..’
Click on Anneke Demanuele, Omar Sherrife & Jordan van den Lamb 'The crew went to Marxism 2026, alongside MANY others. We broke the mould of smart and serious talks to present a bullshit heavy episode of the party line. Join us for a game of “defamation or definitely”, where we guess if Anneke has made up stories or if rich men are actually just psychos. Then we do some myth busting (exactly like the TV show) where we take up some commonly held positions on socialism and capitalism
Hosted by Jordan van den Lamb (@purplepingers), Anneke Demanuele and Omar Hassan. Huge thanks to our tireless editors Charlie Wardrop and Persephone Waxman, and our content editor Charlotte Tavan.'
Click on Watch Mehdi Hasan Watch Mehdi Hasan and special guests Trita Parsi, Harrison Mann, and Swin Suebsaeng react to Donald Trump's Iran deadline, backtrack, and ceasefire deal.
Click on Krystal Ball'Basically, they are in this trust Trump cult mindset. So, they
will follow him more or less. But we're talking about like 30% of the country.
So yeah, the rest of the country is already horrified and disgusted with not
only the foreign policy but really I think the economic policy has been the
more dire implication here. And with this war of illegal horrific war of
choice, people also have this sense of like okay once again you've got plenty
of money. You're asking for $200 billion dollar to bomb school girls in Iran
and you're right now what they're proposing is cutting healthcare again to pay
for that. So rather than focusing on all these concerns we've got at home and
our inability to pay the bills and affordability crisis and now we see gas
prices going up and we know the grocery store prices are to follow. Instead of
focusing on any of that you are actively making things worse with this war. So
look at this point to you know to your point Owen there are no good options.
The good option was to not start this war. The good option was
to take the quite generous deal that was on the table from the Iranians. And so
now here's his basically his menu of options. He can walk away and accept a
surrender. Only his base in the entire world, only his base will buy some sort
of a victory narrative, but he can try to sell that. It will likely spell the
end of the US Empire. It will be catastrophic. It will be catastrophic for the
already the damage that's done economically will be devastating for a lot of
the world, especially the Global South. The long term the end of the US Empire
I think will be good for the World but in the meantime there will be you know
devastating uh implications and obviously for America Firsters it will be a big
problem. So that's one option which is really bad. The other option is as you
say to escalate have some sort of take some island or go in and try to seize
this loose nuclear material which is likely to involve massive US service members
death. it is not likely to create the victory narrative that you want,
especially if you're seizing one of these strategic islands, whether it's Kharg
Island or another one. That means you are embedded then in indefinitely in the
region. So all of these are completely disastrous options, which is why, you
know, in the past, like you said, there's always been, oh, how's Donnie going
to get out of this one?........'
Click on Zeteo“Every war Israel has fought is a war of defense. Every war, they were attacked first,” that’s what Bill Maher claimed on his HBO show ‘Real Time.’
Maher urged Democrats to spread this message to younger voters who, according to him, don’t know anything about the history of the region and get their information only from TikTok.
Click on Owen Jones' Just go get your own oil. That's Donald Trump's latest outburst in his so-called true social uh website. He says, "You'll have to start learning how to fight for yourself. The USA won't be there to help you anymore, just like you weren't there for us." And he says it's countries like the UK need to have the courage to go to the Strait of Hormuz i and just take fuel.
Sounds a little bit like some attempt to sort of walk away from this disaster and just leave the straight of homos as is with all the economic consequences. We got a lot to talk about today with the incredible Yanis Varoufakis who doesn't really need an introduction. You know who he is. Brilliant economist, former Greek finance minister, author, great just a great all round guy as well which is helpful. Great to speak to you. How you doing?
Yanis Varoufakis: It's very good to see you on.
I'm very good. I'm, you know, feeling a bit uh sinful and I have this this guilt
that I'm reasonably well in a world that is going down the toilet.
Owen Jones: It is actually. I'm not going to try
and cushion that particular phraseology. It is what it is. We might as well
just be honest. How you let's just say how what's your general feeling right
now about a war which has now go on gone on for a month which Donald Trump
expected to be over in days after they took out the supreme leader. What's your
where where you at with this?
Yanis Varoufakis: Well, it's I have to say that I was very puzzled when he allowed Israel to do to him that which Israel failed to do in his first term because he recall of course and that in the first term of Donald Trump, Netanyahu again tried to railroad the United States like he he had done with other presidents before to try to get them to participate inmIsraeli US attack on Iran. And Trump had said no to that. And he was re-elected on the only silver lining in the thundercloud called Donald Trump was that he was saying no war unlike the Democrats who had consumed or gone into bed with the neocons. And so I have to say I was puzzled that he allowed himself to be dragged into this because once he was dragged into this there's no easy way out. What I do hope he does is that which uh Roman emperors used to do when the Roman Empire was not particularly strong and they would send legions to what is today Germany to fight the Goths and the Goths would kick their backside and then the Roman Emperor would declare victory and hold a triumph in London in London. My goodness, you see a radian sleep in Rome. So, you know, I'm hoping that he would do that but yeah, it would be a major comedown. He's got the midterms, but there is no alternative other than sinking deeper into into the quick sand of his own making. I mean that that's I guess, I keep talking about this, so apologies for those who are bored of my repetition, but you see this is where I get a bit stuck with this one because as things stand, if they just try and walk away, the US has suffered its biggest, I would say, strategic military defeat since it emerged as a superpower. It's worse than Vietnam……
Episode 35 - The Party Line on the fuel crisis + the far right in France
Omar was out sick so “friend” of the pod Luca Tavan joined us. Luca has “an internet connection and a library card” and has been doing a lot of research into the left and far right across Europe. Following the death of a fascist activist who attacked a left wing MPs meeting, the far right have been normalised and the political centre has rallied with them against France Insoumise, the party of Melanchon. We discuss the ways the far right have been normalised over the last few decades, as well as the fall out from the local elections across the country that took place this month. The human toll of America’s war on Iran continues to roll on, as we enter the fifth week. Thousands of civilians have been murdered, and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has resulted in a global fuel and food crisis. The World Food Program estimates that 45 million more people will be plunged into acute hunger. Trump’s war for empire threatens the entire globe. The team also discusses the upcoming Marxism conference taking place in Melbourne this Easter. The conference will bring together over 1500 people and is organised around the theme of “Marxism for a new left”, and will discuss the dire need of developing a strong socialist movement to confront the barbarism of capitalism. Get your ticket and come along! https://www.marxismconference.org/tic... Readings: Death, destruction, destitution—and profits: https://redflag.org.au/article/death-... First came petrol pain. Now get ready for high-priced groceries: https://www.theage.com.au/politics/fe... Political confusion and fragmentation: the outcome of France's local elections - Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières: https://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip...
ordClick on Jordan 'Hello. I want to talk about this pamphlet on the housing question by Engles It's online if you want to read it. It pretty much describes you know what is a housing crisis? What is a housing shortage? And how do various groups of society solve it? Like from the ruling class to like utopian socialists uand how can you actually solve it? At the moment, we're hearing like pretty much every single politician being like, "I'm going to solve the housing crisis." And then literally none of them doing anything to do that. They proposed various things like cutting immigration, built to rent, like first home buyer schemes, and like we know all of this is just going to be useless. But uh yeah, 150 years ago, like in 1872, uh some old guy wrote out it and it's still true. Engles writes,’ that a housing shortage is a necessary product of capitalism. He says that the housing shortage is a necessary product of the bourgeois social order. That it cannot fail to be present in a society in which the great labouring masses are exclusively dependent upon wages. That is to say, upon the quantity of means of subsistence necessary for their existence and for the propagation of their kind. It's a world in whichviolent and regularly recurring industrial fluctuations determine on one hand the existence of a large reserve army of unemployed workers and on the other hand drive the mass of the workers from time to time onto the streets unemployed in which workers are crowded together in masses in the big towns at a quicker rate than dwellings come into existence for them under the prevailing conditions. He also says, and I think this is really interesting in the next sentence, that the capitalist has not only the right, but by reason of competition to a certain extent also the duty of ruthlessly making as much out of his property in house rent as he possibly can. In such a society, the housing shortage is no accident. It is a necessary institution. Jordan van de Lamb: What Engles is saying is that a housing crisis or a housing shortage is not like a bug within capitalism, like an imperfect version of capitalism or whatever. This is capitalism working exactly as it's intended and it was designed to do. He also says, and keep in mind this is in 1872……'
Jordan van de Lamb: What Engles is saying is that a housing crisis or a housing shortage is not like a bug within capitalism, like an imperfect version of capitalism or whatever. This is capitalism working exactly as it's intended and it was designed to do. He also says, and keep in mind this is in 1872……' I transcribed your intro if you want to use Jordan. an 'Hello. I want to talk about this pamphlet on the housing question by Engles It's online if you want to read it. It pretty much describes you know what is a housing crisis? What is a housing shortage? And how do various groups of society solve it? Like from the ruling class to like utopian socialists uand how can you actually solve it? At the moment, we're hearing like pretty much every single politician being like, "I'm going to solve the housing crisis." And then literally none of them doing anything to do that. They proposed various things like cutting immigration, built to rent, like first home buyer schemes, and like we know all of this is just going to be useless. But uh yeah, 150 years ago, like in 1872, uh some old guy wrote about it and it's still true.
Engles writes,’ that a housing shortage uh is a necessary product of capitalism. He says that the housing shortage is a necessary product of the bourgeois social order. That it cannot fail to be present in a society in which the great labouring masses are exclusively dependent upon wages. That is to say, upon the quantity of means of subsistence necessary for their existence and for the propagation of their kind. It's a world in whichviolent and regularly recurring industrial fluctuations determine on one hand the existence of a large reserve army of unemployed workers and on the other hand drive the mass of the workers from time to time onto the streets unemployed in which workers are crowded together in masses in the big towns at a quicker rate than dwellings come into existence for them under the prevailing conditions. He also says, and I think this is really interesting in the next sentence, that the capitalist has not only the right, but by reason of competition to a certain extent also the duty of ruthlessly making as much out of his property in house rent as he possibly can. In such a society, the housing shortage is no accident. It is a necessary institution. Jordan van de Lamb: What Engles is saying is that a housing crisis or a housing shortage is not like a bug within capitalism,ordan 'Hello. I want to talk about this pamphlet on the housing question by Engles It's online if you want to read it. It pretty much describes you know what is a housing crisis? What is a housing shortage? And how do various groups of society solve it? Like from the ruling class to like utopian socialists uand how can you actually solve it? At the moment, we're hearing like pretty much every single politician being like, "I'm going to solve the housing crisis." And then literally none of them doing anything to do that. They proposed various things like cutting immigration, built to rent, like first home buyer schemes, and like we know all of this is just going to be useless. But uh yeah, 150 years ago, like in 1872, uh some old guy wrote about it and it's still true. Engles writes,’ that a housing shortage uh is a necessary product of capitalism. He says that the housing shortage is a necessary product of the bourgeois social order. That it cannot fail to be present in a society in which the great labouring masses are exclusively dependent upon wages. That is to say, upon the quantity of means of subsistence necessary for their existence and for the propagation of their kind. It's a world in whichviolent and regularly recurring industrial fluctuations deteClick on Owen Jones 'An economic tsunami which will change our lives forever, which will change the course of our history forever. Seems to be very little understanding or awareness of this. Although Italy's defense minister has said he is losing sleep. He says, sorry, he says he cannot sleep because of his awareness of what is about to come. Now that's the consequences of the US/Israeli illegal war in Iran. A catastrophe which will prove the biggest strategic defeat for the United States since its emergence as a superpower. Perhaps proving the final kill or blow for American hegemony. Now before we come on to that, it's worth noting Donald Trump's latest threats because that's obviously linked. He says the United States of America is in serious discussions with a new and more reasonable regime to end our military operations in Iran. truly bizarre spin given in actual fact the US/Israeli assassinations of Iranian leaders means that the Iranian regime is now more hardline than it was before. It's also benefited from its base being consolidated because of a backlash within Iranian society. For some reason, ordinary Iranians don't like being pummeled with bombs from the air. But he goes on to say this, "Great progress has been made, but if for any reason the deal is not shortly reached, which it probably will be, and if the Hormuz Straight is not immediately open for business, we will conclude our lovely stay in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their electrical generating plants, oil wells, and Kharg Island, and perhaps all desalination plants, which we have purposefully not yet touched. This will be in retribution for our many soldiers and others that Iran has butchered and killed over the old regime's 47-year reign of terror. Now, to be clear, what he's talking about here is committing grave war crimes, obscene war crimes. There's literally just boasting about violating the rudimentary basics of international law governing the conduct of warfare.Now, we saw the normalization of war of war crimes with Israel's genocide of the Palestinian people. And because of the lack of outrage over what Israel has done, as we warned many of us at the time, this would simply normalize barbarism. And that's what we're seeing because now Donald Trump can just willy-nilly attack, you know, suggest war crimes, threaten war crimes. No outrage. It's not described as threatening war crimes by most media outlets, not by our politicians. You know, any pretenses of saving the Iranian people gone. Because what he's suggesting here would devastate Iranian society. It would have a catastrophic impact on the lives of ordinary Iranians. It would take many years to recover from such a catastrophic attack......'
Click on Michael West 'As petrol prices bite, the Coalition turns a servo photo op into theatre while Australia backs another disastrous US led war. This week’s Scam of the Week looks at the political spin around the cost of living, the posturing over Iran, Pauline Hanson’s call to back Donald Trump, and why Rupert Murdoch still looms over war propaganda in Australia.' #auspol #iran #trump #albanese 
Click on Mehdi Hasan 'In this exclusive and wide-ranging Zeteo interview, Mehdi presses a senior Iranian official, Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei, who was involved in last month’s nuclear meetings in Geneva, on the state of the war, the future of negotiations, Iran’s human rights record, and more.
Mehdi and Baghaei discussed Trump’s claims that Iranian negotiators are “begging” for a deal, Iran’s attacks on its Gulf neighbors, the country’s stockpile of 60% enriched uranium, its government’s brutal crackdown on protesters earlier this year among a range of topics. Mehdi also presses the spokesman on Iran’s illegal use of cluster munitions in this war, including an Iranian missile attack that killed three Palestinian women in the occupied West Bank last week. *This EXCLUSIVE interview was published a few days ago on Zeteo’s substack. If you would early access to content like this, on the ongoing war in Iran, then head over to zeteo.com and become a paid subscriber today - your support matters!' Chapters: 00:00 Intro 03:10 End to War 04:52 Trump’s Claims 06:01 Negotiations 12:00 Enriched Uranium 16:39 Peace Plan 18:59 Attacks on Gulf 21:51 New Supreme Leader 24:48 Crackdown on Protests 30:25 Cluster Munitions
Click on Owen Jones: Is a ground invasion of some description looming? Of course, we're talking here about US troops. Iran troops are heading to the Middle East in their thousands.
Sina Toossi : Thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much for your kind words. Really happy to be back on.
Owen Jones: Always. Let's just start with this. The troops. Do you think I mean that's where this is heading because the only way Trump thinks he can well he's stuck isn't he in the sense he's he's stuck between accepting a strategic catastrophe militarily for the for the United States can't just walk away because the Gulf of is closed and it can't obviously allow the economic damage to continue as you would see it there. But so then he thinks he he has to escalate it with ground chiefs. Do you think that's where this is heading?
Sina Toossi: Yeah, I mean Trump I mean it's very scary because if he does choose to escalate to ground invasion of Iran, that's not going to make this easier for him. I don't think that's going to give him the leverage he thinks it may give him to get Iran to concede on the trade of Hormuz. It's just it's more going to be him doubling down on this failed policy and this failed war where it was launched on a bunch of deeply flawed assumptions about Iran, about the viability and durability of the Iranian government of its ability to retaliate and they clearly didn't expect that this is the way the war was going to go. This war has so far been very costly on every indicator really for the US including just on purely military conventional terms which I think many people didn't really expect. Like there was this New York Times article yesterday saying that pretty much all it seems like all the military US military bases in the region like 14 or 15 military bases have been made quote unquote uninhabitable. There's been strikes against you know radars air defences you know air refueling tankers you know US forces have been kind of fleeing into hotels waging the war remotely going to Europe. So now that the idea that you know with these assumptions having proven wrong with the regime still there intact…….’
Click on Owen Jones 'Iran has said no to the demands which have been imposed by the Trump administration which had claimed that Iran had called for negotiations and was trying to pressure to get negotiations doesn't seem to be the reality.
What's going on with the whole kind of MAGA movement and all the rest? Well, I'm really delighted to be joined by Sohrab Ahmari, who is the US editor of Unherd. He's an Iranian-American analyst and also an author, for example, of Tyranny, Inc. very accomplished uh and fascinating thinker. So, I've been following your writing for a while and learned a lot. So, it's great to have you.
Sohrab Ahmari: Likewise. Pleased to be with you.
Owen Jones: Just want to start actually with so look Donald Trump says you know we're we're going to have all these demands they list 25 points I think for their supposed demands to Iran. Iran has come back and said no that the war will not end on the when Trump says so. They say the war will end when they say so and that they say. The US and Israel are losing this war. What do you make of I guess the demands, what Trump's positioning has been and how Iran has responded? What do you think?
Sohrab Ahmari:Well, the sort of barrage of demands are in line with the broader aimlessness and confusion of this war. You'll remember when the president first launched it in that like one, two in the morning message, it really leaned toward regime change, right? We were going to put Iran in the in the hands of its own people. Its destinies in the hands of its people, that sort of stuff. And you heard a lot of regime change type rhetoric. Then it changed to um denuclearization...'
Click on Owen Jones "The US elite is in a state of panic, outright panic, as they realize that the Iran war is ending US hegemony. The US has been a global superpower for over eight decades and has had unchallenged global hegemony for 35 years now. Now, his power was already in chaotic decline because of other military strategic disasters, for example, like Iraq, like Afghanistan, like Libya, and because of a crisis stricken economic model, as the 2008 financial crash from which we never recovered has underlined. Donald Trump himself is a symptom of US decline, but he is also an accelerant of US decline as the Iran catastrophe underlines. As we'll see, the gravity of the situation is sinking in amongst US elites, the end of US supremacy.
Although that itself comes with an important warning, which we'll discuss. All of this, to be clear,is down to Iran having control of the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world economy's main arteries, and its power to destroy the energy infrastructure and water desalination plants of the Gulf States, and thus plunge the world into a global depression. is already causing economic mayhem in the United States. That's why Trump has retreated from his threat to attack Iranian energy infrastructure, its power stations, and is now claiming to be negotiating with Iran, which Iran says is a lie. Indeed, the Iranian regime has become more hardline because of the war. For example, Israel killed Ali Larijani, the country's national security adviser, last week. He was seen as relatively pragmatic and moderate. He's now just being replaced by a general described as being uber hawkish.
Wow. Impressive. Now,
let's talk about this panic. Let's start with Donald Trump's former defense
secretary, General Jim Mattis. He says, "Iran right now, if we declared
victory, they would say now they own the straits. You'd see attacks for every
ship that goes through." That's exactly what's happening, by the way.
We'll come on to that. This four-star general who commanded US forces in the
Gulf War, the war in Afghanistan, the Iraq war, who was commander of US Central
Command, says, "We're in a tough spot, ladies and gentlemen. I can't
identify a lot of options." To which he can only say, "Whoops."
He notes that Iran's goal in negotiations would include reparations and the end
of US military presence and support in the region. He concludes I'm not
optimistic about negotiations under the current circumstances. This former top
US general and former Trump defense secretary understands the basic reality. The
United States of America has suffered strategic defeat. A shattering strategic
defeat indeed…..”
Jan Fran and Antoinette Lattouf look at the role the media played in One Nation’s South Australian election surge and ask how should the media report on Hanson moving forward?
Plus: the Aussie news site pumping out hundreds of timely and factual news stories with zero journalists - just one software engineer and a whole lot of theft. Then, how much sway did Rupert Murdoch have over Donald Trump’s attack on Iran? We unpack how Murdoch’s ideology trickles down to his reporters. And finally, ABC staff walk off the job for the first time in 20 years. What’s behind the strike—and what on earth is the “Lattouf clause”? 0:00 What’s on the show, our Tshirts and live events 06:57 Murdoch, Trump & Iran: the hidden influence? 10:34 Do Murdoch outlets follow the boss’s lead? 13:35 This Aussie news site has ZERO journalists (!!) 20:15 AI is coming for journalism—are we ready? 23:15 One Nation’s shock surge in SA 28:45 Did the media help One Nation’s rise? 32:30 Barnaby compares Muslims to cattle 35:19 One Nation blacklists ABC 44:20 One Nation: No policies, mystery backers 48:00 Far right rising: role of journalists moving forward 50:10 ABC strike: first in 20 years 53:03 The “Lattouf clause”: the fight behind the scenes 57:48 Tucker Carlson vs The Economist: on Israel 1:04:03 Why journalists won’t say this about Israel
